When I first discovered the grainy picture in my mother's desk me as a towheaded two year old sitting in what I remember was a salmon-orange-stained lifeboat I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the boy in the boat was not waving and laughing at the person snapping the photo as much as he was frantically trying to get the attention of the man I am today. The boy was beckoning me to join him on a voyage through the harrowing straits of memory. He was gambling that if we survived the passage, we might discover an ocean where the past would become the wind at our back rather than a driving gale to the nose of our boat. This book is the record of that voyage.

When he was sixteen years old, Ian Morgan Cron was told about his father's clandestine work with the CIA. This astonishing revelation, coupled with his father's dark struggles with chronic alcoholism and depression, upended the world of a boy struggling to become a man. Decades later, as he faces his own personal demons, Ian realizes the only way to find peace is to voyage back through a painful childhood marked by extremes privilege and poverty, violence and tenderness, truth and deceit that he's spent years trying to escape.

In this surprisingly funny and forgiving memoir, Ian reminds us that no matter how different the pieces may be, in the end we are all cut from the same cloth, stitched by faith into an exquisite quilt of grace.

Simultaneously redemptive and consoling with bright moments of humor . . . thisstory is chock-full of sacredness and hope. Cron is one of only a few spiritualityauthors who could articulate these themes as poignantly.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Ian Cron writes with astonishing energy and freshness; his metaphors stickfast in the imagination. This is neither a simple memoir of hurt endured, nora tidy story of reconciliation and resolution. It is rather like Augustine sConfessions a testimony to the unfinished business of grace.

DR. ROWAN WILLIAMS, Archbishop of Canterbury

Ian Cron has the gift of making his human journey a parable for all of ourjourneys. Read this profound book and be well fed, and freed.

FR. RICHARD ROHR, O.F.M., author ofEverything Belongs

Ian Morgan Cron is a brilliant writer. This is the kind of book that you don t justread. It reads you.

MARK BATTERSON, author of In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day

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